


Echo Effect

by AirgiodSLV



Series: Call and Answer [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-31
Updated: 2011-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-22 00:46:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AirgiodSLV/pseuds/AirgiodSLV
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’ve talked about this, some, planned for eventualities in which one or both of them might be compromised, but the truth is there’s really no help for it. Even splitting up and going to opposite ends of the globe won’t lessen the strength of the cord tying them together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echo Effect

**Author's Note:**

> Anniversary ficlet for [Call and Answer](http://airgiodslv.livejournal.com/539083.html).

Eames is two levels down and halfway through finishing the job when the pain hits. It feels as though someone’s stabbed him through the chest with a red-hot poker, and he gasps and clutches at the front of his shirt before the pain bowls him over onto his knees.

It’s not him. He knows that, intellectually, but it’s hard to separate intellect from the pain receptors in his mind, which are screaming that something is wrong. And something is, of course. Just not with him.

Arthur is on point, standing guard on the next level up. Or he had been; based on the level of agony Eames is currently experiencing, Arthur has probably been put out of commission.

They’ve had a year to figure out the bond between them, and how it affects each of them in different situations. Arthur has died many unpleasant deaths before this. They’ve each been shot, stabbed, strangled, torn apart, killed like vampires with a stake through the heart. Once, notably, there had even been a crossbow bolt.

It still hurts, every time. The knowledge that Arthur is feeling the same thing does nothing for Eames’ clarity of mind, and puts the job in a hazy, uncertain place on Eames’ list of priorities. He can’t go up a level to help; if Arthur’s been compromised that badly, it means he’ll die and the dream on the first level will collapse in a matter of seconds. Down here, that only gives Eames a few minutes to finish what he came for.

It’s hard to focus, however, with fire branding him from the inside out and stabbing serrated knives into his lungs. Every breath takes effort, and his heart feels caught between racing wildly and winding down into stillness. It’s Arthur’s rhythm dragging him down, Eames knows. Arthur’s heart is going to stop, and the bond is pulling Eames along with him.

He crawls toward the high round table in the smoky bar they’ve created for this job, blinking pinprick tears of pain out of his eyes as he hauls himself up. The mark hasn’t noticed Eames’ collapse, and is waiting at the corner table for his girlfriend – Eames – to return from the ladies’ room.

Eames is on his feet and taking one shaky step at a time toward the mark when fresh pain floods through his body, physically wrenching him so that he barely catches himself on the nearest table. Arthur hasn’t died and woken up yet, it seems. What in God’s name is happening up there?

“All right there, love?” one of the patron projections asks, and another makes a joke about Eames having had too much to drink. He closes his eyes and focuses on holding the forge together, plastering on a fake smile and sauntering toward the corner table.

He makes it two more steps before fire tears a line from his navel to his collarbone, and this time when he falls to the floor he can’t get up. Arthur isn’t just dying, one level up. He’s being tortured.

When Eames finally chokes down the nausea and blinks the world back into focus, their extractor is standing over him. She’s an ice-blonde Russian by the name of Ekaterina Goruaia who came recommended through Arthur, who had worked with her several times before. Her face is impassive, watching Eames heave and pant on the dirty bar floor.

“So it is true,” she says. It takes Eames a minute to figure out what she’s talking about, and then he wishes he hadn’t. He has a flashback to another bar, some months back, and Orla saying _there are rumors about you two, you know_. He should have known then. Once Orla hears something, it’s only a matter of time before everyone knows.

Eames risks another look at the corner table, but the mark isn’t watching them. Too much to hope that he’d intervene and take his inebriated girlfriend home to sleep it off. Eames is going to have to find a way out of this one on his own.

His heart spasms, echoing Arthur’s final drowning breaths on the level above. Eames needs to know he’s all right, with a fierceness that borders on panicked desperation, but he can’t lose sight of the goal down here.

“Christ,” he gasps, as he feels another fresh burst of agony blossom, this time in his right thigh. “Send Gibson up. Something’s gone wrong, but we can still finish the job.”

“Gibson’s already up,” Ekaterina says. Eames can’t make sense of that at all, until pain shreds his left arm, and suddenly he does. He knows exactly where Gibson is, and why Arthur is taking so long to die.

“And we did the job,” Ekaterina continues, ignoring Eames’ attempts to haul himself close enough to reach her black stiletto boot. She produces a disk, holding it up so that Eames can see. “That’s what we were waiting for. This is just…a bonus.”

“You bastard…” Eames begins, fumbling with the fabric of the dream for a weapon, but he’s sluggish and clumsy, and Ekaterina doesn’t wait for him.

“No hard feelings, Eames,” she says, finally taking a step away from him as his hand almost, almost grasps at her boot. “It’s just business.”

Then she’s gone with a single neat gunshot to the head, kicked out of the dream, leaving Eames flopping like a landed fish on the filthy concrete floor. There’s nothing physically wrong with him, so dying and waking up is going to take some doing. He still can’t manage to produce a firearm, so he drags the tablecloth off one of the low tables, bringing three glasses and two bottles crashing down with it, and shatters one of the beer bottles against the table leg.

Slitting his own throat is unpleasant and incredibly messy – his hand slips in the first spurt of blood and he can’t get a clean cut – but it does the job.

He wakes up on the first level to find Ekaterina and Gibson both gone, undoubtedly legging it out of town before they have to face Arthur – whose wrath is far-reaching and merciless – and Eames – who may not have as many databases at his disposal, but who doesn’t shy away from getting his hands dirty in the least.

Between the two of them, Eames gives Ekaterina and Gibson three months, tops.

That doesn’t help them with the current issue, however, which is that the metaphorical cat has been let out of the bag, and there’s no putting it back. Eames’ bond with Arthur might not make scientific sense to anyone else, but there’s no trying to disprove it after tonight’s fiasco.

Eames pulls the line out of his arm and sits up, taking stock. There are no hostile projections in sight, which means his assumption was correct, and Gibson is the reason for Arthur’s current state. There’s also no sign of Arthur.

There is a blood trail, which Eames follows with one hand clutching his ribs, knowing he’s not actually in danger of spilling his intestines onto the floor but unable to shake the feeling. If Eames had thought the pain was bad on the second level, it’s much worse up here, amplified by being in Arthur’s mind.

He nearly falls down a flight of stairs and has to crawl through the last hallway after his right leg gives out completely and refuses to do his bidding, but he finds Arthur, cuffed to a pipe and slumped over in a growing pool of his own blood. His gun, either as a taunt or pure lack of caring, is lying on the opposite side of the room. Eames growls low in his throat and finds a reserve of energy somewhere that pushes him across the floor to the discarded weapon.

“Fuck this,” he snarls at the abandoned room, and puts Arthur out of his misery.

He follows a second later, opening his eyes to the roof of the mark’s limousine above him, and the sounds of Arthur dismantling the PASIV. As predicted, Ekaterina and Gibson are long gone, but the mark is still hooked in beside them, stirring as the dream collapses and pushes him out into consciousness. Not only have they been double-crossed, they’ve also been left behind to do the clean-up.

“Chloroform,” Arthur says shortly, pain lingering in his voice. It’s all psychosomatic at this point, luckily, which means that Eames is no longer immobilized, but he can still feel Arthur’s unsettled emotions through their bond.

Eames knocks the mark out before he can even open his eyes, and helps Arthur tie off the remaining loose ends. Their original plan had been much more elegant, but with only two of them and the clock ticking, it’s easiest to resort to making this look like a straightforward mugging. There’s always a possibility Ekaterina and Gibson have called the police on them, in order to buy themselves an extra day to get out of the country. They can’t take the chance.

“Still with me?” Eames asks, as Arthur gets out of the car and almost immediately staggers, catching himself on the door of the limousine.

“Fine,” Arthur bites back. “Let’s move.”

Their former teammates have predictably taken off with their getaway car, but the mark’s limousine is parked under a bridge just off the freeway, which means there’s always catching a cab – or if that fails, a carjacking.

Thankfully they flag down a cab within two minutes of reaching the bridge, and after Eames does a very thorough – if quick – check of the cabbie’s appearance, credentials, and habits – it would be all too easy for Ekaterina and Gibson to scoop them back up this way – he and Arthur are bundled into the back seat, headed for a hotel in the opposite direction of where they’d been staying.

Arthur’s edges are no longer quite so sharp, although he doesn’t relax – and won’t, Eames knows – until they’ve reached a bolthole and found out just how bad the damage is. He’s at least sitting back against the seat, shoulders straight, and no longer clutching at phantom pains.

“You know what they were after?” Arthur asks, and the tone of his voice says that he already found out from Gibson.

“Us,” Eames replies shortly, and Arthur’s expression sets, grim.

They’ve talked about this, some, planned for eventualities in which one or both of them might be compromised, but the truth is there’s really no help for it. Even splitting up and going to opposite ends of the globe won’t lessen the strength of the cord tying them together, and at this point it’s unlikely that anything they do will dispel the rumors.

“Keep the change,” Arthur tells the cabbie when they reach their destination, and then they go and stand inside the hotel lobby until he’s driven off, at which point they come out again and walk to the nearest bus station. If anyone checks up on them, they’re going to be chasing dead ends for a while before they get anywhere.

They lay two more false trails before Eames catches Arthur’s elbow and says, “Enough.”

He knows Arthur would keep doing this all night if he were alone or the circumstances were better, but they’re both exhausted from the hectic days leading up to this job and jetlagged from the flight in. Ekaterina and Gibson chose their moment wisely.

Arthur squares his shoulders as if he’s going to put up a fight, but over the past year Eames has learned how to put pressure on Arthur in more ways than simply making puppy-eyes at him and asking nicely, and Arthur caves almost at once. There’s a mid-range hotel two streets from their last drop-off point; nothing fancy, nothing too questionable. It’s part of a chain marketed toward vacationing families, unremarkable in every way and with enough traffic that they’ll remain as close to anonymous as they can be.

They take the elevator up in silence, and Eames waits until the door is shut and dead-bolted before he fences Arthur in, blocking off all avenues of retreat until he has Arthur crowded up against the wall and still.

Arthur’s perfectly capable of getting himself out of his current position, but luckily for Eames, he doesn’t want it badly enough to put up a fight. He holds himself aloof still, not touching Eames anywhere even though Eames has him boxed in on three sides with a solid wall at his back, breathing slightly faster than normal.

“We should have known this would happen,” Arthur says finally, when Eames has made it clear that he’s not going anywhere.

“We did know this would happen,” Eames reminds him. “There just wasn’t much we could do about it.”

Arthur shakes his head. His eyes are closed, avoiding contact with Eames’. “I mean I should have known. Before this. When we still could have done something about it.”

“Arthur.” It’s not an old fight, precisely, but it’s not a new one either. Most accurately, it’s a non-fight that they’ve had before and will have again, every time Arthur’s…unique physiology…lands them in an uncomfortable situation.

“Arthur,” Eames says again, waiting Arthur out until his eyes reluctantly open and he looks back at Eames. “I knew the consequences going in, remember? I still wouldn’t trade you.”

“You shouldn’t have had to make a choice,” Arthur returns stubbornly.

“Bollocks,” Eames says succinctly. “Every relationship comes with compromise, Arthur. I know this might come as a shock to you, but you would have been a liability to me no matter what. This thing between us,” he says, reaching down inside himself and pushing emotion through the endlessly deep channel that connects him to Arthur, “doesn’t make a bit of difference in the end. Someone could have seen us together after a job, or checked our travel records for the past year. Arthur, they could have caught me looking at you and known.”

He does touch then, carefully resting a hand on Arthur’s shoulder and squeezing. Arthur doesn’t pull away from him.

“How are we worse off than Orla and Dmitri? Or Safiya and Keshet?”

“Or Mal and Dom,” Arthur replies.

“Or Mal and Dom,” Eames agrees steadily, because he’s not backing down on this one. And whatever else, the Cobbs didn’t end in tragedy because of anyone else in the dreamsharing world.

He holds Arthur’s gaze until Arthur finally unwinds slightly under his hand, shoulders dropping and spine straightening. “It’s still a liability,” Arthur says.

“Arthur,” Eames says, warmer now and able to let himself relax now that Arthur has, “you were a liability from the moment I first met you.”

He leans in and Arthur doesn’t move to stop him, tilting so that their lips meet at just the right angle. Eames doesn’t press anything for a while, just kisses Arthur slow and deep against the wall, reaffirming his choice with every achingly sweet slide of their tongues.

Eventually he draws back, dropping his hand from Arthur’s bicep after one final squeeze to let Arthur know he’s not going far. “Let’s get you in the shower,” he suggests, because they could both use one, and the muscles in Arthur’s neck are a cluster of knots. “And maybe a hot bath, after.”

Arthur gives him a quelling look that has lost most of its potency ever since Eames gained the ability to feel Arthur’s actual emotions. “I don’t need to be pampered.”

“You were shot full of holes and ripped open with a meathook,” Eames says, with impressive lightness for the fact that he can still see those barren metal pipes in his mind, the air thick with the smell of Arthur’s blood. “I think I deserve a little room for pampering.”

Arthur once again attempts to look unimpressed and superior, but Eames has played this game before, and the warmth pulsing through their bond lets him know that Arthur is at least somewhat secretly pleased.

They scrub down with an efficiency that can’t quite be trained out of either of them, but after the last of the travel dirt has been rinsed away, Eames takes charge again and steers Arthur out of the spray to make out with him lazily against the wall, the steam from the hot water doing enough to keep them warm even against the cool tiles.

Arthur is more aggressive than he had been before, nipping at Eames’ bottom lip and flexing against his hold. Eames yields when Arthur finally forces the issue, stopping before Arthur can push him against the wall and switching to run water from the tap, settling down in the tub.

Arthur looks down at him with one eyebrow cocked, as if to say, _are you really doing this?_ Eames just walks his fingers up Arthur’s bare leg, until he has three fingers massaging the pit of Arthur’s knee. Arthur folds, if not gracefully, then at least promptly after that.

Eames sinks back against the head of the tub and lets Arthur climb on top of him, weighing him down and trapping him against the porcelain. Arthur spends another few minutes just kissing him, his tongue in Eames’ mouth and his teeth constant warning pricks against Eames’ lips.

It takes some maneuvering and a lot of squeaky position adjustments, but eventually they arrange themselves with Eames’ cock rubbing slick and wet between Arthur’s tightly-clenched thighs, and Arthur’s cock sliding and glancing off Eames’ abs as he crunches up to set his teeth against the cords of Arthur’s neck, licking and biting as Arthur pants heavily against his shoulder.

“Enough, I want…” Arthur manages, and Eames only just manages to bite back a sound of protest as Arthur moves away, turning over and repositioning himself with his arse pressed tight up against Eames’ cock.

“What do you want?” Eames asks, because this has been an unexpected delight over the past year, finding out what Arthur likes and doesn’t like outside of dreams, what surprises him with his responses and what shocks them both.

“Touch me,” Arthur demands, already riding his arse back against Eames’ cock in sloppy, deliberate rhythm, causing the water around them to slosh up against the sides of the tub. Eames obliges, wrapping one hand securely around Arthur’s cock and stroking, rubbing his thumb over the vein and beneath the head.

He teases Arthur’s nipples with his other hand, because this is something he has yet to tire of, feeling Arthur jerk and clench and gasp with each pinch and twist of Eames’ fingers. Arthur kicks out when Eames rolls one nipple between his fingers, his foot glancing off the side of the tub with a protesting squeak.

“Harder,” Arthur says, and when Eames pinches down again his whole body jerks, arching into the touch and then away from it, grinding down harder against Eames’ cock.

“Arthur…” Eames warns, and Arthur nods disjointedly, putting more concentrated effort into working Eames’ cock with his delicious arse while he fucks up into Eames’ hand.

Arthur comes first, with Eames twisting his nipple and squeezing over the head of his cock, and then he sinks back into the water with a familiar dazed lethargy. Eames almost can’t bring himself to care, with Arthur’s endorphins flooding his own body and carrying him on a contact high. He’s gotten off before just from bringing Arthur off, from the tidal wave of sensation that rips through him whenever Arthur climaxes.

He’s not quite there yet, though, which he helpfully reminds Arthur of after a minute of just breathing hard and hitching his hips pleadingly against Arthur’s – now motionless – arse.

“Sorry,” Arthur murmurs, twisting around on top of Eames and pushing a hand back through his wet hair, which is definitely going to need another shampoo after all of this. He gets his mouth down as far as hovering over the head of Eames’ cock, until Eames can feel his warm breath and practically taste the tight wet heat of his mouth, and then stops. Eames resists, nobly, the urge to shove his hips up and force Arthur down onto his cock. Barely.

He does bounce a little, hopefully, because Arthur hasn’t moved and doesn’t look likely to change that anytime soon. Eames knows why, of course. As filthy as he can be in dreams – as filthy as he’s willing to let Eames get him in the real world – Arthur will always draw the line somewhere. Unfortunately for Eames, it seems that the line involves sucking cock while submerged in bathwater that already contains both sweat and floating bits of spunk.

“Your hand is fine,” Eames grits out, because _anything_ will work at this point, and Arthur gets a sly, knowing look. Then he wraps a hand around Eames’ cock and strokes, slowly, and starts doing that _thing_ that he does, which Eames is utterly helpless against every time.

It’s not a physical sensation so much as it is emotion; layer upon layer of satiation, contentment, happiness. Arthur uses afterglow like a particularly fine tool in his arsenal, taking Eames apart with everything he’s feeling until Eames is a sweaty, boneless mess.

Arthur lifts his hand from Eames’ softening cock and licks the spunk off of one long finger.

“Christ,” Eames mutters, his cock trying to decide whether they really are done for now after all, and pulls Arthur down on top of him to kiss him until they’re both arguably messier than they were before they got into the tub.

They take another shower, and Eames knocks Arthur’s phone away from his fingers when he reaches for it on the bedside table. “There won’t be anything out there yet,” he says reasonably. When Arthur’s eyes narrow, Eames sets his hands on Arthur’s hips and squeezes. “Get some sleep,” he says. “We’ve got a hell of a mess to clean up in the morning.”

Arthur capitulates with his usual lack of good grace, but Eames ignores him, satisfied with the victory. And it does feel like one, even though he knows perfectly well that both of their reputations are compromised in the dreamsharing world now, and that by tomorrow morning neither of them will be able to take jobs safely without the risk of being used against the other.

He has Arthur beside him, alive and whole, and a secure knot of warmth in his stomach where Arthur lives, even when they’re apart. That’s really all that matters.


End file.
